Helpful Score: 2
Cousins Nick and Helena have high expectations for their "real" lives after WWII. The women are disappointed when secrets and lies keep surfacing. When their children find a body, the story turns sinister.
This debut author very credibly built suspense to a compelling end.
This debut author very credibly built suspense to a compelling end.
Taking place between WWII and the end of the 1960s, Tigers in Red Weather is about two cousins - Nick and Helena - and their families. The novel explores how people change, how they interact with one another, and how everyones choices have an impact on other people.
Tigers in Red Weather teetered between being just average to downright boring. The characters are cardboard and unoriginal, the dialogue is uninteresting and everyone has the same voice, and the shifts in chronology are clumsy and confusing. What disappointed me most, however, was that the author never surprised me.
The book is constructed in five parts, with the story being told from the perspective of five different principle characters. This could have been an opportunity for the author to twist things up a bit by making the reader see characters and events in an entirely different way. But in each story, everything remains exactly as I had perceived in it the previous narrative(s). The best word to describe the book is: predictable.
All in all, it felt like the author was playing it safe and simply applying how to write a novel formulas she learned at university. I think if she is willing to be a bit more daring and edgy in her next work, she will prove to have talent that isnt exhibited in this debut novel.
Tigers in Red Weather teetered between being just average to downright boring. The characters are cardboard and unoriginal, the dialogue is uninteresting and everyone has the same voice, and the shifts in chronology are clumsy and confusing. What disappointed me most, however, was that the author never surprised me.
The book is constructed in five parts, with the story being told from the perspective of five different principle characters. This could have been an opportunity for the author to twist things up a bit by making the reader see characters and events in an entirely different way. But in each story, everything remains exactly as I had perceived in it the previous narrative(s). The best word to describe the book is: predictable.
All in all, it felt like the author was playing it safe and simply applying how to write a novel formulas she learned at university. I think if she is willing to be a bit more daring and edgy in her next work, she will prove to have talent that isnt exhibited in this debut novel.
Really enjoyed this book. It was much more suspenseful than I had anticipated which was great. The story is told over a period of years but brings each characters perspective about those events/years to light in chapters titled with their names. The ending was more than sinister than I had expected but captured all of the family dysfunction in one dynamic conclusion.
I was not crazy about this book. The characters were interesting, but the story had too many turns,and I feel like everything was left hanging at the end.
